Our house is on fire. Join the resistance: Do no harm/take no shit. My idiosyncratic and confluent bricolage of progressive politics, the collaborative commons, next generation cognitive neuroscience, American pragmatism, de/reconstruction, dynamic systems, embodied realism, postmetaphysics, psychodynamics, aesthetics. It ain't much but it's not nothing.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Sam Harris interviews Phil Zuckerman

Harris interviews Phil Zuckerman, author of Living the Secular Life. They start by differentiating the terms secular, secularization, secularism and atheism. Then this:

Harris: "Many of us have acknowledged that although 'replacing
religion' may not be an appropriate goal, religion does offer people
many things they want in life—and these are things that most atheists
also want. We want nice buildings that function as dedicated spaces for
reflection and celebration. We want strong communities. We want rituals
and rites of passage with which to mark important transitions in
life—births, marriages, deaths. We just don’t want to lie to ourselves
about the nature of reality to have these things. This poses a real
challenge, because once we get rid of religion, we are left without an
established tradition for meeting these needs, and the alternative is
often piecemeal, halfhearted, and unsatisfying."

Zuckerman: "So here are the options, as far as I can tell: First,
secularize religion. By that I mean keep the rituals, the holidays, the
buildings, the gatherings, the knickknacks, but let the supernatural
beliefs wither and fade. The example of this that first comes to mind is
Reform Judaism. Most American Jews get what they like out of
Judaism—the ceremonies, the holidays, the sense of belonging,
multi-generational connections, opportunities for charity—and yet they
have jettisoned the supernatural beliefs. Many liberal Episcopalian
congregations, too, are in this vein. Also Quaker meetings. And most
Scandinavians, with their modern form of Nordic Lutheranism, are as
well. They observe traditional religious holidays and they participate
in various life-cycle rituals and they congregate now and then in church
and they even 'feel' Christian—and yet they do all these ostensibly
religious things without a scintilla of actual faith in the
supernatural."